2005

 February: Beyond the Bouncing Ball

Right, I have two questions here, and after I’ve answered them, you can just ask anything from where you are sitting.

One of the questions is from somebody who is no longer here, she’s gone off on the road, but she’s asked me to answer so she can hear the answer on the tape. It’s not so easy for me if she’s not here, but I’ll see what I can do. That’s from Miriska.

But Puja is here. She has written to me:

Dear Michael. How can I open to deep joy and love and gratitude? In Energy Work and in life I am constantly sent back to sadness and anger against God and life itself. I seek light, I make myself try very hard, but I suspect that I also make sure I fail, to prove my anger right. It’s a vicious circle.

So Puja wants to feel, as we all do, joy and love and gratitude, but instead of finding that, she falls back into sadness and anger against God – I guess for not giving her these beautiful things – and against life itself.

Well, that’s how it is for many people. The mind gets into a certain set, a certain position, a certain arrangement – like climbing a pole, having a little cage on top, and sitting in it and looking out at the world. And then when we experience anything, immediately whatever we experience is snatched away by this bird in a cage and made to fit into the perspective that it has. And these ways of looking at things that we have are incredibly powerful. They have a lot of momentum, a lot of power to go on. They have a history, they have a whole continuity about them. And until, Puja, one finds something else inside oneself where one can be, dwell, live, until we find such a place, an alternative place, then this place, this cage, this outlook on top of the tower seems to be the only place that’s available to us. That’s where we live.

One of the aspects of all minds, not only disastrous minds, but even for more open minds, relaxed minds, is the attitude that any experience, however beautiful or extraordinary it is, has no reality for us until it is interpreted by the mind. The whole idea of having an experience without really knowing or being able to describe what that experience is like, or knowing what its meaning is for oneself, how it fits into the movie of one’s life, of having just a happening that is what it is and that’s all, this is anathema, this is poison, this is unacceptable to the mind. The mind says, ”You have to translate this experience into a form in which I can understand it and slot it into the rest of my perspective on life.” So if you have a set that says, ”Life is not great, life is hard, life is tough – in fact, life does not give me what I want,” then it’s almost impossible to establish anything acceptable that is outside that particular way in which you interpret reality.

It’s like if you imagine… Well, you don’t even have to imagine it, because it’s widespread in the world. If somebody has a really disastrous childhood, I mean really disastrous, where they’re bullied and beaten and they get no freedom, everything they do they’re told they’re not allowed to do, they have to do what they’re told to do, and if they don’t there’s great punishment, and they live in hell, the effect of that experience over the years, of course, is for the mind to take the standpoint that life is hell. Not just to say, ”Well, I’m unlucky. I’ve had a tough time, I’ve got the wrong parents,” or the wrong environment, or whatever it might have been, ”so I have to suffer this, but I know it is not really, truly life. I know that life is something beyond this, but I have to go through it,” as one might do with a very tough experience later on in life – to simply see it as something that is happening but it is not how life is. If it happens when you’re very young, then for you this is what life is like. And it’s hard for such a person who has been treated in that way to look at that and say, ”Well, that was bad luck, but I know that life is really otherwise, or can be otherwise.” The experiences that they have determine their whole outlook. And so when people commit terrible crimes – and we all read about these things, or hear about them – so often the perpetrators are simply reflecting in their actions what they have experienced and what has been acted out upon them. The way they see it is, ”Well, this is the way life works. Now I’m lucky, I’m on the other side, so I can do to other people what other people did to me, and that’s fair because this is what life is like” – master and slave, tyrant and subject, perpetrator and victim.

Now, that’s an extreme case that I have portrayed there, most of us are not so unfortunate, but things do happen to us, and most of us don’t yet have a position outside that from which to look at it – which is what spiritual work is all about: to gain a position, a place to be which is outside all experience, so that you can look objectively at your experience and say, ”Well, this happened and that happened and so on, and I got really hurt, but that’s not me,” or, ”that’s not life. That’s an incident in my life, and that’s all it is – an incident. And another incident can be completely different.” We don’t have that, because we immediately get sucked into these negative experiences, and we’re inside them, and then we see the world through the way that we have come to experience is how life treats us. So once certain attitudes have been established in us through our life, through our interactions, it is extremely hard to drop them and create an open space where those attitudes that we have established in us have no power any more.

And even for people who have had a good upbringing – and by that I mean an understanding and a loving and caring upbringing – and therefore don’t have that especially negative way of looking at the world, still there’s this strong belief in them that everything that happens has to fit into the mind movie. So even for such people it is hard to get out of the mind, because of course good patterns are much easier to live with than negative patterns, but they’re still patterns, and they hide from us the pure experience that we can have, which does not have to be reduced to the mind system.

So even if the mind has the capacity to let go of itself so that experiences can be had which are outside the mind and which are not controlled by the mind, or don’t actually move through the mind into the system, so the mind is not governing the experience, still afterwards the mind will say, ”Aha, that was like this and that was like that, and so it fits in here.” And then the position from which you are living doesn’t really change. It might expand, and you can allow for a greater variety of experiences, the movie gains more depth and more width, but still it’s the same destructive process of breaking experience down into the components of the mind system.

This process that I’m describing of the tyranny of the mind, which demands that everything that happens has to be understood, has to be slotted into the set-up that it has, this is almost impossible to escape. It’s possible, but almost impossible. Very few people manage it. Even very few people who are on the path to escape from that manage it; even people who have been involved with others in trying to escape from this trap, they don’t manage it. And for people who don’t suffer, like Puja does, with a system that sees everything in terms of suffering and hard work and negativity, so that she gets tremendously angry against life itself for not providing her with the right nourishment, for people who are not stricken in that way and have a more open mind, a more generous mind, a more appreciative mind, a more optimistic mind, then even for them, they’re still trapped. And once you are trapped in the mind, it is really the work of a Houdini to get out.

So even if you manage to get some good experiences, and the mind accepts them as good experiences… Maybe, for example, Puja starts to have some good experiences and she says, ”Well, I don’t feel so negative any more.” And so maybe she has some nice times for a while and becomes more optimistic, but then if something really problematical happens again, the mind says, ”There you are! I was right before. Life is full of suffering. I had a nice time for a while, but that was just a trick. Now it is back to normal. Just as I thought, it’s all hell.” So you haven’t escaped. And as long as you identify with the mind you will never escape. Never. The mind is always assessing and judging and weighing up – ”Good, bad, indifferent; good, bad, indifferent; great, terrible, indifferent.” It is always doing this. So there’s never a pure experience.

Now, if and when you manage to get out of the mind – I am not talking about not having a mind, I’m talking about getting out of the mind as the place from which you relate to life – if you can get out of the mind, then everything is just as it is, you don’t have to put it through the sausage machine, and you can eventually realise that life is not suffering, but joy.

These were the last words, I now recall, of the great dancer, Nijinsky – a great Russian dancer, probably the greatest ever. Towards the end of his life, he said, ”I hear my children singing, and they tell me that all is not suffering, but joy.”

There is, really and truly – it is hard to believe and to accept, but it’s true – there is really a state of being in which you live in paradise most of the time, or enough times for you to know that that’s really there, present. And when you are in paradise, then everything is beautiful. It is not a question that only the beautiful things are beautiful, but the things that before you would not have considered beautiful are also beautiful. Then everything is a taste of living, the flavour of richness – a participation in the great happening of creation. If you participate, everything can be like that. And that is a measure. You taste that and that becomes the measure. That is then the standard by which you measure everything else. And then you may say, ”Well, I’m not there, I’ve lost it,” but even if you say you’ve lost it, you know it’s there. Then you don’t believe any more in any other kind of state. Even if you suffer from them again, you don’t believe any more in any absolute reality of any other kind of state.

You may not be able to hold it, you may not be able to give it full continuity, that experience. Maybe at first when it happens it’s just a flash and then you doubt it. But when it seems to happen often enough, then that is the standard by which you measure, that is the touchstone. If you know what gold is, then you may find yourself using other metals, but you won’t take them for gold when you know what pure gold is. When you know what a pure diamond is you can make do with a lot of other things, but you don’t think they’re diamonds, you know they’re not diamonds. So when you feel like Puja does about life… Well, she says in her letter that she has a feeling that she is doing this to herself – which is true. In other words, she sees that she is contributing to the fact that she falls always back into sadness and anger. And the way we contribute to that falling back is that we still hold to the belief that the way that the mind sees things is not only reality – that’s bad enough – but that it’s who we are, which is worse. It’s much more personal. We cling to the idea that it is too bad, we’re very unlucky, we’d like to have a different kind of mind, but after all, we are what we think, we are the way we see things. But we’re not.

So Puja says that even when she’s doing Energy Work she finds the same thing. But the more Energy Work you do, the more you get into it, the more you get these tastes of pure experience.

I mean, when you look at the things we’ve done these three days, what use has the mind been? We’ve not been studying, we’ve not been discussing, we’ve not been trying to think of beautiful, amazing insights and inspirations. I haven’t said a bloody word until now, really. There were no discussions about anything. You just had raw experiences. And for some of you they were experiences you’d probably never had before; for others, yeah, you’ve had them before and there they are again. Not in one place has the mind had an influence in these explorations we’ve been doing. Your mind may have been busy, I’m not saying you haven’t been busy in your mind, but if you hadn’t got a mind, if your mind had been completely still, your experiences would not have been reduced at all.

So through the Energy Work, one of the things we do is to give people this understanding – the understanding that you don’t need to understand. This is the most important understanding that you can have: the understanding that you don’t need to understand. In fact, the demand to understand is undermining your capacity to simply experience.

Now, I’ve just given Puja’s partner a name, and I said it means ‘the Divine Heart’, and that if you find that, then love simply moves from there towards all life – spontaneously. Not because this person is beautiful, or this person is kind, or this person is nice to you, or this person you have an affinity for – the usual reasons – but because you are in the basis of existence and so is everything else, and on that level what else can move between one part of existence and another if nothing else interferes?

So a long time ago, when I was much younger, I realised that what I am saying now was the truth of life – that the mind was the obstacle to a pure state of existence – but then I remember saying to myself, ”But the mind can’t just sleep all the time. I can’t put it to sleep. And if I did, what would I have?” In other words I was saying, ”I see the problematical nature of my mind, how it interferes with reality and with my experience, but where else is there to go?” And then I began to work with energy – beginning, by the way, in France, a long time ago (Puja is living in France) – and then I saw that there was another place to go. And that is the place that I try to show everybody who comes to see me.

I saw that there’s a space to be in where you can be at rest and be with everything, and feel connected with everything, and feel extremely alive and present, and where the mind is irrelevant. And the more you are with that space, the more you are aware that the mind is still there, but it is not interfering, because you are not asking it to come.

But actually all the time we are asking it to come. Even when we’re complaining that it’s there, in a way we are asking it to come. We are saying, ”Without the mind, I don’t have a reality.” But you do. Pure reality.

So hopefully, Puja, you can continue moving in that direction. I’m just making it clear so that you at least know the direction you maybe have to go in to solve this situation.

And the other letter is from Miriska, who isn’t here any more, but she writes:

Sometimes I feel the energy going round and round in my head, as if it was in a prison. This is energy which leads to illness, but is it also energy which heals and breaks up structures?

Well, in a way, I’ve covered that, but not entirely. I was talking about the mind, and she describes the activity of the mind – which Puja put into words, and I’ve responded to on that level – as ‘energy going round and round’. And she says, ”This energy leads to illness.” Well, yes, of course it does.

Living solely through the mind is its own illness anyway, but of course it can lead to serious illnesses – not only physical illnesses, but emotional illness, political illness, religious illness, fundamentalist illness. All these fundamentalists are crazy people. It’s all mind. ”I believe that this is the truth, and nothing else can possibly be the truth except the truth that I believe. And I defend that and support that.” That is pure mind. A pure idea in the mind that this belief is the truth – whether it is Muslim, or Christian, or political, communistic, or whatever.

So she recognises it’s an energy. And she says it’s an energy which leads to illness, but is it an energy which also heals and breaks up structures? In other words, can the same energy that is driving her crazy in her mind be used to become free? And the answer is yes, sure, it’s the same energy. And if a lot of the energy goes round and round in the head – as it does for her, as it does for most people – then you haven’t got much energy left to explore the space, even if you can find it, where all the experiences and dimensions of reality that the mind has not yet managed to include will always exist.

It’s like there’s a vast space, and there’s a ball bouncing around in the space, hitting there, hitting here, hitting there. And outside the ball that is bouncing around there is a whole universe that the ball doesn’t know anything about. It only knows about the places that it bounces on – a bit here, a bit there, a bit over there. The ball is bouncing around, and only the places where the ball hits does the ball become familiar with. That’s how the mind is. Just what hits you, what comes to you, you know a bit about, and that which doesn’t come to you, you don’t know anything about. But if you manage to escape from the ball, then you can go anywhere. You are free to be drawn anywhere – or if not anywhere, at least there are vast possibilities.

So there you are. That’s my teaching. Anybody want to ask anything?

(Torbaray) How to stand hate when there is no love experience? How to stand hate and feelings of desperation?

Well, Torbaray, there is a lot of hate in the world, but you don’t have to be involved in it, and you don’t have to react to it. You know, on Wednesday we had the usual darshan here for the people in the house, and somebody was speaking about people’s attitudes towards her and about how she wasn’t sure how to respond to them and so on, and I said to her, ”Whenever you make a judgement of somebody, always make the judgement and then add the words, ‘just like me’.” So if somebody, you feel, is being a certain way which you feel is really objectionable and shouldn’t be happening, and you judge them, then say, ”You are full of hate – just like me.” Because every time we see something standing out in the world that bothers us – that’s not to say that because there’s hate in the world, you feel hate, but if it bothers you, if you have a reaction to it – then as sure as eggs is eggs, as we say, you have that in you too.

(Torbaray) Yeah. But how to stand it when you have it so often and you cannot have a different experience?

Well, it’s the same, Torbaray, as I have been saying already to Puja. Exactly the same. Puja was talking about suffering, she talked about anger, she talked about hating God and life, and I said to her, ”Yeah, that’s your mind-set.” And the same is true for you.

It is all your mind-set. And you are running around trying to deal with your mind-set, but one thing you have not done, in all the years I have known you – well, maybe sometimes, just for a moment – is to actually let it go. To simply let the whole mind and its views about yourself, and other people, and life, and your situation, and your relationships, and how people are with you and the way you are with them, and your complete failure to feel good about yourself or feel good about other people or good about life, to let that go.

The whole of this is simply an arrangement that has come to you through your life experience and your mind, and you constantly want some magic to alter this so you have a different perspective, and I’m saying, well, maybe it can be done in that way, but at some point you have to see that this whole perspective is just a dream. It is just a dream! Because everybody else has a different dream.

You are in a situation, say here, and everybody else here is also in this situation, and you have a certain perspective about what is going on, and so does everybody else. And every single person here has a different perspective. So what is the reality? Are you right and everybody else wrong? Is this guy over here right and everybody else wrong? Everybody has a different view of exactly the same reality. So who’s right? Nobody is right! Except me. And I have no perspective. I have no view of what is going on, I just am here. So you can’t take away my point of view, because I don’t have one. I don’t have a point of view.

This whole weekend I’ve had no point of view, I’ve just been here and responded to the energy of the people in the group. But that doesn’t include a perspective.

Maybe there is an energy perspective. That, I think, is possible, to have an energy perspective. But at least it doesn’t destroy me and it doesn’t destroy other people either. It is harmless enough.

There are some things, Torbaray, that you will not take on board. It’s all just a dream. And you are caught by your dream. More than caught. You are held in a tight fist by your dream. And you in some way get energy out of that, you get power out of that, you get some spice out of that. And it’s very familiar, of course, as well, and if you let it go you would probably feel a bit lost because this is how you have been all your life, and you have very good reasons for being like that, I know, and you can talk about the reasons – you had a tough time when you were young, with your father and so on, and all of this – but it is just a dream. It is just a dream, a nightmare. Ein Alptraum.

Another participant: If you want to let go of your mind in your daily life and there is not a spiritual teacher around you, is the only way to practise this to put your awareness to your breathing, or are there other ways also to practise it?

Well, it’s certainly not the only way. You say ‘if you don’t have a teacher around’, but of course you do have a teacher around all the time, because you have your inner teacher. I am only, in a way, trying to waken up your inner teacher, not to make myself a necessary part of your life, because I can’t be – because I’m living here and you’re in Denmark. And this is the same with everybody else. So I cannot be a day-by-day influence on you. I can, in a way, but then you pretend it’s me when it’s actually a part of yourself.

So you have the inner teacher. And what I do in the seminars which you can’t do is to indicate maybe where your inner teacher lies inside you, and by feeding that, first by resonance, by awakening, and second by giving the perspective my teacher has, or me as your teacher has, to encourage your own inner teacher to have its own perspective on what you have to do in order to make real what you have tasted many times when you have been with me.

You get flashes, but the whole basis of this, which I’ve been talking about this afternoon, that is something which everybody has to do for themselves. I cannot do that for you. I cannot stop your mind. If I could drag you out of your wretched mind, I would do so immediately, right now – for everybody. But I cannot. You have to do it yourself. You have to be ready for it, and you have to somehow be prepared to live your life without it, and that cannot happen at the drop of a hat. It may be a gradual process, but you can do it for yourself.

Of course, when you watch your breathing, it brings you out of your mind, and it brings you into a simple reality. But this is also a simple reality: putting my hand on the arm of my chair, feeling my thumb against my forefinger, feeling my bottom against the chair, listening to sounds. All these things.

You see, when you hear a sound… Sound is very important. It’s interesting that the Sanskrit word for sound, which is shabda, is also one of the names for enlightenment. A man comes and asks a master, ”Where is the Buddha? Where is my Buddha?” and the master says, ”Can you hear the sound of the river?” The man says, ”Yes.” And the master says, ”Enter from there.”

So sound is really important. Sound is click, click, click (clicking his fingers). You don’t need to think. (clicking his fingers again) Everybody hears that sound.

I said just now that nobody has experienced these few days together in the same way. I said to Torbaray that everybody has a different perspective. But if you’re not deaf, and I click my fingers like that, you all hear the same sound. So all the minds are united in that sound. There is no individuality in listening to that. There is no separate mind, belief, or perspective on that sound.

If we start discussing why two fingers clicked together like that make such a sound, then we get into the scientific or biological reality of that, and then we have to discuss it, and then we have different views. But just the pure sound is a simple reality that is not in the mind. So anything that is simply just the case gives you a moment of realisation that life is there, independent of what the mind tells you is there – or tells you is not there. As I used to say in my old days, in the early days of my Work, I would look at somebody and say, ”The experience of your hands on your knees at this moment has more importance for you than every thought that you will have for the rest of this year.” Because this is just this now. ”Here I am.”

So put your hand on your knee. Or even better, put your hand on somebody else’s knee. Anything else before we finish?

What is the German word for the dumplings we had in the soup today?

Participant: Klösse.

Klösse? Is it? Well, the whole mind is a Kloss, a dumpling. If you see a picture of the brain it looks like a dumpling. I really love this soup! We had it today with dumplings in it. And every time I eat a dumpling, I feel I’m eating somebody’s mind. That’s a great teaching. Now when you see me sitting at the dinner table eating people’s minds you can say to yourselves, ”This is as good as what is going on in the seminar!”

Questions and Answers, Energy Clearing Process, 27th February 2005